No Shirt, No Shoes, No Facescan, No Service: Welcome To 21st Century Convenience Store Shopping

Developers of facial recognition software and their customers are finding new and uninventive ways to use unproven tech to keep people out of places. Law enforcement just wants to watch everyone who's out in the open and strays too close to the right cameras. Security agencies just want to watch everyone leaving or entering the country.

Private businesses, on the other hand, want to limit their interactions with certain people. Landlords are replacing keys/locks with cameras and phone apps. Retailers are implementing facial recognition tech to create digital barriers to entry. Given the tech's error rate, the chance of misidentifying someone as a shoplifter is omnipresent, leaving would-be shoppers in the awkward position of attempting to prove a negative just for the opportunity to give a retailer money.

Large retailers have already played around with the tech, but it's now finding a new home at the smaller end of the retail spectrum. The Seattle Times reports a convenience store chain is kicking the facerec tires.

Jacksons Food Store customer Denise Diharce was surprised to learn that the Tacoma location she frequents for odds and ends is testing a high-tech system that, prior to entry, will compare her to images of previous crime suspects.

Before patrons can enter the basic convenience store at the corner of South 38th Street and Pacific Avenue, a camera under a red awning will take a picture and use artificial intelligence (AI) to decide whether the image matches any in a database of known robbers and shoplifters at that location.

This was during the chain's test run. But it's moving forward with full deployment, seeking to have the systems run during night hours to keep criminals out of its stores. When the system is on, customers will be informed of the system's use -- something they will have a hard time not noticing when a speaker asks them to stand still and point their faces in the direction of the camera.

The system used by the convenience store chain is very much DIY, which probably keeps it at an affordable price point. There's no link to existing criminal databases. Every undesirable member of the public must be hand-flagged by store staff to be added to the database. Limiting the number of faces in the database should help decrease both false positives and false negatives -- something that's a commonly-observed problem with larger deployments linked to much bigger databases composed of both criminal and non-criminal face photos.

In isolation, this use may seem justified. Convenience stores tend to get robbed more frequently than other retailers and anything that adds a bit of safety for employees is probably a good thing. But it can't be viewed in isolation -- not when government agencies at all levels are snapping up facial recognition software from a handful of vendors who are creating massive databases of photos for use by almost anyone -- public or private -- that can afford to purchase the tech.

The steady creep of surveillance tech makes people more accepting of even more serious encroachments on their privacy -- or just their ability to move around in public without being "noticed" by dozens of cameras linked to dozens of databases.